Smile for Me
by AxJfan
Summary: One-Shot. Judai is wandering through his never-ending reincarnation cycle and is unbearably sad. Set in a person's POV who is not revealed until the end. Alexis Asuka and Jaden Judai Fianceshipping. A bit of Drabble going on here and AU I guess...


**DISCLAIMER: I DON'T OWN YUGIOH GX!**

**AN: This might end up being part of one of my future Fanfictions... not completely sure yet! Just thought I'd throw it out there!**

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Smile for me

It's in the way that he smiles at me, the way that his eyes soften, and the way that his hand—always his right—comes to a rest at my shoulder, they tell me. And they continue to tell me, over and over again as we roam around this falling kingdom that is the world. They tell me in dramatic swoons, in bitter tears, in giggling hallways, that he must love me, isn't it obvious?

And they tell him.

It's in the way I stare at him, trying to memorize his face, the way I run to him, the way I know exactly what he needs. They tell him in dirty locker rooms, crowded coffee shops, riding in his car, and texting during class. They tell him its love, and to run if he knows what's good for him. And they always tell him, running their big mouths off, in each new life that he encounters.

But we just smile.

We know already, we will tell them, that love is in our eyes and our minds and our hearts. We tell them, with smiles and glances and laughs, not to worry about it, because we already know.

They never do believe us.

They are stunned, exchanging glances as if we had just sprouted out wings and flown away towards the gates of heaven. They don't know that we both wish, with a passion unique only to us, that we really could. They just shake their heads and ask what they are going to do with us; why won't we chase our love?

We just smile through the pain.

Or at least we used to.

Things are different now. He doesn't smile as often, and they can no longer see what's between us. They come to me with their swoons and shrieks, asking if I love him. They encourage me to approach him, though I am with him every single day of this never ending existence, and admit my feelings. It had never been this way before. They never had to ask it. They used to know.

We used to smile.

The last time they had known it had been far too long ago. Centuries? It was impossible to keep track. The years without that smile were always too painful to add time to, and they were too long to make me want to keep track. Now I didn't know what to say to him. I didn't know what he needs when his eyes—those chocolate eyes that he had passed on to me—misted over with a soft tinge of regret .

We used to know, but now we don't.

They no longer whisper or giggle about us in the hallways that haunt our many teen years. Now they try to court us, only to be turned down gently, with a horrible imitation of the smile that once was and never again will be. They sense that something is between us, but they no longer know what it is.

Then they are gone.

It happened quickly, in explosions, mushrooms filling the atmosphere with venomous clouds. It happened with fire that rained from the sky, even as it cried for its broken children. It happened, even as we thrice gave our lives trying to stop it.

It happened.

There is no sun, no animals, no laughter, no tears, no shouts, no agony—no life. Yet we are trapped here, searching for whatever it is that we must save among the few other survivors. I wondered to him once, if it was humanity that we were supposed to save, and he gave me a look that I would never forget. He told me, eyes tainted with their golden rage, that humanity had fallen already, and that we were not here to try and create something that we couldn't.

There was no smile.

I cried for many lives after that, missing the way that they would approach me and tell me I was in love, or that he was in love—even though we weren't. He was crying too. But he had been crying for a much longer time, and I wondered if he had known this was going to happen even before I had. He was so much older than I was after all, he was a world wiser.

And now here we are, standing together, our scarred feet bleeding openly against the blades of grass that cut us even deeper then flesh. He is taking me to a place I do not know. Perhaps I would have known where it was if he was smiling, because that is how I remember the places that we had visited before—bathed in our sunlight. We would create long shadows around us, watching aimlessly as they stretched into the vanishing point on the painted blue horizon. He would comment lightly that they were trying to reach heaven too before running a hand across a scar that he carried with him everywhere he went.

But now was not the time for me to think of what used to be. Now was the time for me to push myself with inhuman endurance to keep up with him. Now was the time to pause as we bowed our heads against the whipping demons that had once been a soft breeze. Now was the time that he reached back to me and took my hand, shielding me from its worst with his chest, daring it to try and take me away from him. It ended as quickly as it came, and we pushed forward again.

My feet were bloodied stumps by the time we stopped. I sank down, making a sound that was horribly like a whimper, and took some pieces of cloth that he had salvaged earlier in the week to rub the soles off. He had yet to find a pair of shoes not disintegrated by the touch of a nuclear devil, and so the feet suffered against the dead landscape.

I winced as I pulled out a particularly disgusting particle that resembled dirt, or at least I thought it did. It had a similar tinge of brown to it that dirt did, like his eyes... which I could feel against the back of my head. He limped over to my side and kissed my filthy once blonde hair, taking my suffering feet in his capable hands. Hopeful, I glanced up at his face, but it wasn't there. It was an exact copy of what was between us—silence. I was stricken by the sight, and he knew it, but did not comment. His hands kept up their work with my injuries, ignoring his for the time being, and his eyes stayed focused on the soles of my feet.

I was besieged by a need to speak, to fill the space between us, but fear held me back, its strong choke squeezing my thin throat. I hadn't spoken in years. It wasn't something that we had needed to do to understand each other. Our minds were far too alike to limit our communication to verbal words constructed by a race that would only fall. But I had cherished those languages almost as much as I had cherished the stars at night and the sun in the day. They gave me a way to speak without reminding me of the fate I had been born into. But now... did I even know how to speak?

I worked my mouth as he worked at my feet, movements too soft and crafty to be completely human, and continued to move it even after he had fallen asleep against what was once a fallen building. With frustration built up within me like the fires of hell, I crawled over to his side and devoted myself to watching him until the time that I had to assume was morning. I cut myself off from our bond; which startled him enough to wake up and put his hands towards his worn down pants as if he was reaching for a knife.

Incredulous, he twisted to me, his brown hair blowing violently around his hardened face as the wind lashed out once more, its greedy fingers picking at his once sun-kissed skin. Now he was so pale and bleached from the lack of sun he was like a starved vampire ready to strike me. He put his hands on my shoulders, his thoughts swirling in his angry eyes. Why had I broken it off with him? What was wrong? Was I sick?

I stared back at him, my mouth moving in a furious attempt to address him.

Something must have made sense to him, for he loosened his grip and pulled me close, hugging me as affectionately as he had in my first life. He made comforting noises in my ear and tried to send soothing thoughts, but I rejected them. The rejection hurt him, but he understood none-the-less. We stayed together for a fleeting moment of eternity before he lifted me onto my aching feet and asked, through a serious of hand gestures, if I could walk.

My cracked lips slipped over lost words and failed noises. Sending air out through my mouth, I nodded, biting my lip and sending pain rippling through it. Failure was growing all too common now for it to bother me. It bothered him though, with every step that he braved in this landscape of death, he was taking a step farther from me, farther from what had once been.

Farther from that smile.

I inhaled as deeply as I dared, breathing in toxins that had yet to fade away, and trailed after him. My feet complained from underneath me, but I pushed the darkness that made up this world around them to numb it. It worked for the first five miles. Just as I was about to stop and recover, he slammed thoughts against my mind—not threatening but not excited either. A bittersweet melody was coming from his eyes, his mind, his posture, and I was seized with an urge to hum to it and put it to lyrics.

But I stumbled over sharp pieces of glass upturned by the wind and clutched onto his arm, leaving darker trails of murk against his porcelain skin instead. We were overlooking a valley seized by debris and destruction, its presence of darkness extraordinary. Many people had lived here at the time before the end; many people had died with bitter thoughts. What could he want in a place like this?

He led me down into the crater of the old city, past what would have been streets and shops and homes, and kept walking with me until he reached a shattered statue in the very center of the chaos. It was of some reigning war hero now forgotten, the only distinguishable pieces being half of his stone head and his hand, lying down on the petrified blades of grass, pointing towards the center of the Earth as if mocking its parting. He squeezed my hand tightly and stood in front of it, his head bowed, before he moved away with a knee-jerk motion.

His footsteps became urgent now, as if he was afraid that what he was looking for had been spirited away with the rest on the northern winds from which the apocalypse had originated. I was dragged along by his blind prayers and his rough hand, eyes searching for any souls that may still linger in such a haunted place. There were none that I could see, hear, or sense with all of my power, except for the weary one guiding my hand.

We stopped in a field of thin green knives that threatened my feet once more. A great heaviness was pushed against his mind, even though he was attempting to push it aside for me. I pressed him forward in response. He had unfinished business in this place, and if anything, I would help ease his suffering as he had eased mine. He stumbled forward, suddenly unsure of himself, and second-guessed his decision to come here. His shoulders tightened into balls of rock muscle, the lines around his eyes crinkled, his beaten fingers curled towards his calloused palm, his legs rooted themselves into what was once the earth, and he looked back at me.

I nodded.

He tilted his head back and stared up at the black coiling sky above us and became a statue, still as the heart that had left him long ago. I watched him blankly, admiring how unmoving he was and the way that he continued to stare up at the black heavens as if he was calling on an avenging angel to take him.

Daring it to.

Abruptly, he advanced through the dark world, wary of crumpled stones. I followed him dutifully, eyeing a stone wing sticking out of the ground. It was the only thing around here that seemed to be completely intact, whole, with its feathers masterfully displayed, the erosion of nuclear waste only adding a realistic look to them. I believed, for a blissful moment, that I could touch that wing and unearth its fallen counterpart, and together we could fly away from this horrible place and bring the smile back.

The thoughts escaped me when I crashed into him, for he had suddenly come to a halt, staining this place with new blood from his feet. He had become the statue again, and I imagined attaching the wing onto his back so he could be lifted by the wind, so he could soar high above this pit of misery and woe he had fallen into, so that he could fix the world like he had vowed his eternal life to do.

He could return the soft breeze with a flap of his new wing, breathe life into the devoid soil, be the seeds from which the plants could blossom—and he could smile again, just once more, to part the ominous clouds and reveal the glorious rays of sunlight that one reign over our existence, and life could begin again.

Children would laugh, animals would scurry, adults would shake their head, they would tell us we were in love, and it would—rain? My hand went to my face on reflex, brushing away the drop of water that had fallen onto my nose and wiped away some of the grime. I looked up, expecting to be greeted with the suffocating punch that rain created as it fell through the damaged atmosphere, but saw nothing. The wind was still howling around me, the grass was still cutting into me, and the wing was still enticing me. Nothing was different—then where had...?

My focus shifted onto the man in front of me, and then I shuffled past him so that I could look him in his wet hopeless eyes. That was my intention, but I was stopped by the sight of what he had been staring at. 'Impossible,' was my first thought, 'How?' my next. But as I stared at this perfectly intact headstone, the words still carved in it clearly as it had been the day she had gone to permeate rest, I knew how this had come to be. A miracle, given to us from above in some kind of repayment for our tortured souls, and yet a reminder of what we had lost and now had to live with every single day for the rest of existence.

A grave, the grave of my mother.

I knew now, why he had stopped smiling when they told him he was in love in the football fields, in his bedroom, and in detention. Because he had been in love, once, a very long time ago, and every time they said it, it reminded him of it. Because they had told him once that he was in love with her and told her she was in love with him.

I knew why he had become increasingly sad over the lives that we endured together, because with each time he woke up after death, he was not looking into her eyes. He could never again look into her eyes. He was cursed with unusual immortality, and she was free with her humanity.

"You looked a lot like her," he said, his voice suddenly filling up the barren wasteland. He knew how to speak! "Except the eyes; she always said you had my eyes."

Those lovely words! How amazing it was to hear a voice brave the gap between our ears and begin building the foundations of a bridge! How incredible it was to listen to the humming under his meaning that fastened together the rungs! How stupendous it was to listen to his footsteps as he crossed half-way and waited for me—for me—to join him.

How very sad he sounded.

I spent the next minutes—hours?—trying to speak as easily as he did. He had always made everything he did so effortless, and I suppose that is what happens when one is only partially human. He had only given me half of his half, so I was having a considerable amount of trouble in return.

But finally, "S-She said... I had... your... smile too." Although my tongue tripped and fumbled many of the proper sounds, I did not care, he did not care! My throat rejoiced in being used for speaking instead of labored breathing, and a slight piece of something gave way in his face, showing me what could be beneath his mask of sorrow—what had already been.

"She did, didn't she?"

"Ye...ss," I agreed, pleased, but my lips staying firmly molded into place on my clay complexion. We were silent once more, staring down at her grave, each on to our own thoughts. Maybe night fell and we were still standing together by that plaque, reading her name over and over again, filling ourselves up on it, breathing in her life, our love for her, and our pain without her.

Then I knew.

"Dad... will you tell me more about her—about Mom?"

He was quiet, and I wondered if I had been wrong after all. But then he turned towards me, connecting us with his eyes, and held his arms open for me. I rushed into them wordlessly, and he held me like he did when I was a child.

"I love her," was the first thing he said, and he said it with such a passion and conviction that the world should have bowed before such a being with a capacity to love her for such an immense period of time. It was so great, so reassuring, and so horribly sad, that all I could do was smile. And he followed suit, the tales of her sliding off of his tongue and lifted from his shoulders.

And we smiled for the first time since the birth of this dead world, and for this moment we were bathed in sunlight. Because we knew somewhere in that big sky above us, they were all watching.

She was watching too.

They told her, resting on white clouds, playing with their golden halos, soaring freely around their forever, that she was in love. Couldn't she see, by the way we spoke of her and the way tears fell from our faces? Didn't she know, by the way she looked at him everywhere he went, and the way she longed to kiss my head at night?

And she just smiled, because she knew.

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**So, did you guys like it? I know I was supposed to be working on Golden Eyes, but then this popped into my head so I wrote it before I lost it...**

**Hehehehe... Sorry. I'll get out the next chapter of Golden Eyes ASAP. **

**Thank you for reading and PLEASE review! It encourages me to write more. Thanks again!**


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